I think the type of work I do lends itself more to guys. In particular, we do a fair bit of travel, which means longer hours and being away from home. This being the case, women who (somewhat by default) are the ones who mostly look after the kids aren’t really in a position to be regularly be away. That, coupled with the fact that we mostly hire PMs and technical consultants which have a male bias anyway, means we just have more boys.

I think if I had young children, I would not want to be doing my current job. The one other female in the office has a 2 year old, and I think she finds it hard.

Fortunately, for the most part, my boss hires clever people who just happen to be male, so it’s a good environment to be in. But one or two more females wouldn’t go astray.

On the hiring front, yeah, there’s gotta be a baseline competence, or you’re just harming, not helping; if you’ve got two good people saying, “Well, another woman in the team would make for a more balanced environment” is a fair call.

Hiring an incompetent because she’s a woman is a terrible decision, and will likely just turn everyone off on the idea of trying to diversify their workplace, since they’ll translate “diversity” to “hiring idiots”.

I guess it would be vaguely interesting to figure out whether there are any fields which there is an even gender balance – maybe it’s not a tech thing, but it just seems like a tech thing because that’s where we notice it most.

Webstock invites its speakers to talk; but I’m not sure how much of a conscious effort they make to even out the numbers. They do seem to have about 25% women pretty consistently, though.

BitNorth was really diverse in all directions. There are a lot of tech people who go, but there was also a strong librarian contingent (not all women!). Talks were also all over the place (:

(If someone wanted to hire a woman to work with me, just because they were a woman, irrespective of their ability, I would probably have a grumpy if they turned out to be incompetent. Curiously, incompetence in colleagues who are women bothers me far more than incompetent men)

Stephen was very keen in his time at the Elves to try to make a point of recruiting outside the white male nerd box, but hit the problem of finding people who weren’t in that box and could do the job. I suspect that would be a common complaint for anyone trying to improve the workplace, but conferences shouldn’t have that problem, because you don’t need to own the talent pool that’s presenting. It’d be interesting to see how the organisers of the sucessful examples you cite went about it compared to the more normal conferences; were they lucky, or did they work at getting a more diverse range of speakers? Are some topics better than others?

I also think that as a ladynerd, that if anyone had tried to overtly and directly push me into the tech field, I probably would have dug my heels in d: But that’s another blog post.

Of course, there’s always outright tardery to exacerbate matters, such as the whole Rails pornstar debacle (which at least helped spur me to migrate off Typo 4.0…).

An auxiliary problem is engaging people in the field in such a way they don’t feel like they’re being blamed if they haven’t done anything blameworthy so there’s not a defensive reaction.